Book Mark: Blue Metropolis Literary Festival Awards

From CBC.ca:

Montreal’s annual Blue Metropolis literary festival is luring American novelist Joyce Carol Oates in 2012 by honouring her with the International Literary Grand Prix. The $10,000 award recognizes a lifetime of literary achievement by an internationally acclaimed writer.

Oates published her first novel in 1963 and has been nominated for the Pulitzer Prize three times – for Black Water, What I Lived For and Blonde. She has often been a controversial voice, exploring themes of violence, class tension and sexual abuse in contemporary America.

The Blue Met Arab Prize goes to Egyptian Ahdaf Soueif, known for her lyrical novels and her journalism pieces in The Guardian. Her new book, Cairo: My City, Our Revolution, analyzes the political upheaval in Egypt.

Edoardo Nesi is the winner of the Blue Metropolis Strega Prize, which promotes Italian literature, for his novel Storia della mia gente.

The Blue Met festival plans to focus on the writing of Cuba this year, bringing crime writer Leonardo Padura, poet Wendy Guerra, and the novelist Eduardo Manet to Montreal for readings and discussions of the Cuban literary scene.

Crime writing will also be in the spotlight, with Quebec writers Alain Chaperon Trevor Ferguson, Florence Meney, Jean-Jacques Pelletier and Chrystine Brouillet talking about their approach to the genre.